Friday, October 22, 2010

TV drives search and social

British company Yeo Valley Organic have a new TV ad that they launched with a TV ad in the TV show X Factor on Saturday 9th October.

As Robin Goad of Hitwise points out in his blog post, this had a noticeable and quantifiable effect on the number of searches for Yeo Valley, and the level of traffic to the Yeo Valley site.

For example on a 12 week rolling average, searches for Yeo Valley were up 24%. The nature of rolling averages is to flatten out spikes, so it means that on a day-by-day level searches must have absolutely sky-rocketed.

There was also a bit and measurable effect in social media. As Nick Burcherpoints out on his blog, Yeo Valley quickly became a trending term on twitter - in fact the top term for London (in the midst of an eventful X Factor show) and the second biggest trending topic globally.

This all goes to show how TV and other mainstream media drives other activity like search and social.

This is why I believe that the big media agencies will prosper in the future. If you're planning and implementing search campaigns for a client, you need to know all about, and be involved in, other media activity like TV.

We find that if you have a TV campaign you get more clicks on your paid search links, so you can reduce your bid prices while the TV campaign is live. If you have a separate search agency, this is much harder to do.

Similarly with social. When you have a major paid advertising campaign people will comment on social sites, want to watch the videos on video sites, and so on, so it makes sense for the process to be as connected as possible.